Tag Archives: education

Me and a friend were recently discussing that he had decided he would want to start a career as a front-end developer. During our discussion it became known that one of the more famous sites for online courses Udemy.com * has a discount for a number of course. A lot of great (at least they seem so) courses have been discounted to the price of $10.

So my friend asked me what courses would be reasonable to undertake in order to gain fair knowledge about the front-end development stuff. Here’s the advice I gave him:

Hey, I’ve just finished (listening) the book What Would Google Do and I must say it was great. The focus of the book was not so much Google as a company and its politics and corporate structure (as some may expect) as what are the principles and ideologies that Google preaches. As well as why such a principles are so successful in today’s world.

About the author (Jeff Jarvis)

After listening the book I became interested in Jeff‘s background and how did he got the idea of the book. Also what other ideas he got. So, naturally, I started following him at Twitter (@JeffJarvis). For anyone who is more interested in reading blogs, you could as well visit the BuzzMachine.com which I intend to follow as well.

What Would Google Do principles

The main principles I will take away after listening to this book are:

Give people control, and they will use it;

Control and trust are reciprocally correlated – the more you want to control your audience or customers, the less they will trust you. Handle them the control and you will receive back their trust and willingness to follow you;

Charge your customers as little as you can bare instead of (the regular and mainstream way) as much as the market could bare;

Create a platform for collaboration and open all your information for third parties;

Give your product’s core value for free and monetize on the additional value your product can provide to customers;

The rest of the principles I will left for you to discover.

After reading this one I added the other Jeff’s books to my to-read list in goodreads.

Probably the next books I am looking forward to reading (listening) are as follows:

If I could put in a simple manner the things I took from this book, they would be:

Start small and simple;

Hiring is not frightening as long as you have the patience and perseverance to find like-minded people;

Hire people that are like you;

Build a team, not a crowd of workers;

Treat your team members the way you would like to be treated;

Delegating without control is a disaster;

No victory comes fast or easy;

To say honestly, I was not a big believer in that “mission statement” thing. I often do hear the sentences: “Our mission statement is” such and such, “We have to have create a mission statement before we can be successful” and so on and so forth. I actually did not believe that such a “piece of paper with a bunch of gibberish in it” is of a significant importance to anyone. Dave Ramsey made me make up my mind. I still am not a huge believer but at least now I know what is its meaning and why it will come in handy at a certain moment.

I will recommend this book to anyone who is:

A kind of entrepreneur

Business owner

working in a company but wants to change something for the better

As a conclusion: I became a fan of Dave’s and I will subscribe for his podcast on that topic: the EntreLeadership podcast.

In this new post I would like to continue the topic from a recent one (Attending the Cisco entrepreneur institute) and suggest you a way of examining your future or currently existing business in terms of its model, its core values and its ways of spinning the cogs of the whole machine.

I am talking about the “Business Model Generation Canvas” or rather often referred as “the canvas”.

I stumbled upon one very interesting and very widely discussed question. It gets even more discussed in times of recession. The question was “MBA or Experience?”. The good thing is that I had the right answer (as I think at least). I got lucky I am listening the Freakonomics podcast kind of often and knowing they had their two-part episode about that question a while ago.

So if you are looking for the answer of that question too, swing by the answers.onstartup.com page with my answer and follow the links to the episodes there. And don’t forget to leave your vote on my answer, ok?

One of the great things that happened to me recently – yeah, I attended a course of Cisco Entrepreneur Institute in its Bulgarian licensed representative Entrepreneurinstitute.eu. The name of the workshop (their word for the course thing) was “Growing a business“. With one sentence this workshop set my mind straight and showed me what I had to do with my ideas and what should be the right steps doing those things.